I'm reading a little book a French friend recommended: America by Jean Baudrillard, card-carrying French intellectual. I have to say that I'm not impressed. It's not a book on America at all; it's a masturbatory poem provoked by a dream of America.

Take this sample passage (chosen pretty much at random, the whole book is like this):

There's a sort of miracle in the insipidity of these artificial paradises, so long as they attain the greatness of an entire (un)culture. In America, space gives scale even to the insipidity of the 'suburbs' and 'funky towns'. The desert is everywhere and keeps meaninglessness at bay. A dessert where the miracle of the car, of ice and whisky is repeated every day: wonder of facility linked to the fatality of the desert. A miracle of obscenity, stricly American; of total availability, or the transparency of all functions in space, which however remains indivisible in its extent and cannot be tamed except by speed.

His style has wit and movement, but there is hardly a sentence in it that can be taken without correction.

He talks about the desert a lot, and of course the desert is impressive, and it's completely surreal to build cities in the middle of it (Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas). But the desert is in the Southwest, historically the last part of the country to be settled. It could not then have contributed much to the national character.

"Insipidity" and "unculture"... that's the kind of insult I expect from schoolboys on the Net, not from great writers. It's nothing but the classic snobbery of the European intellectual with regard to the American savages: "You people may have money to burn, but we have culture." This pose is a bit outdated these days, when prosperity and bad taste are as prevalent in Europe as here.

(My French friends explain that for Baudrillard "insipidity" is virtually a compliment; for him European culture is atherosclerotic, and America seems like a liberation. But this is just the opposite side of the same ignorance. He invents a fantasy America to berate tired old Europe with.)

There's funky, there's town,,but there's no such thing called a funky town.

"Obscenity" is strictly American? If he means lust or decadence, you can find those just as easily in Paris, Rome, or Bangkok. (Perhaps he's never seen Fellini?) Same thing with banality, or greed, or the horrors of our foreign policy.

Later on we read:

Where they [other interpreters of America] spend their time in the libraries, I spend it in the desert and on the roads. Where they take their subject from the history of ideas, I take mine from the present, from the movement in the streets... This country is naïve; you must be naïve there as well.

Nice methodology! He can do anthropology simply by driving down the Interstate! And of course, never entering a library or considering an idea, he doesn't run much risk of encountering any "culture".

It may be that I just don't understand French intellectuals. They have, it seems to me, a tendency to overgeneralize; their remarks are so abstract, so vague, and so suspect, that they lose almost all meaning. And they are more attached to themselves than to their subject: they're drunk on their own literary éclat, carried away by their own verbiage. Baudrillard doesn't tell you about America, but about Baudrillard.

He talks about insipidity and unculture, but he's completely missed the insight of Tom Wolfe, who (with just as pyrotechnic a style) understood that the vulgarity of American culture comes in part from its very prosperity. This is not because money kills culture-- art has always depended for patronage on the rich-- but because in America, the middle and working classes, the proletariat, has for the first time in history had the means to satisfy its own tastes-- which are not at all those of traditional (aristocratic) culture. So we have monster truck rallys, hot rods, miniature train collectors, Star Trek conventions, bowling teams, ham radio, Cabbage Patch Kids, youth culture, the consumer culture. America is the country of pop culture, not because it's a nation of savages, but because it is the first middle class nation; a country where the average Joe is (historically speaking) well off.

Baudrillard continues: "In New York... centrifugal force is such that it's superhuman to think of living as a couple..." Say what? Apparently it's news to Baudrillard that in the USA people fall in love, marry, have children-- that people live their lives, exactly as in Europe.

Our cultures are getting closer together. Obviously there are important differences between Europeans and Americans. But Europe is no longer undergoing its interwar or postwar crises; it's enjoying the same more or less generalized prosperity as we are. It even has the same Wolfean pop culture: music, comics, TV, theme parks, video games. And we've become rather decadent-- that is, sophisticated. We've declined a bit, just like Europe; we've left the role of the world's innovator-- the place that asks questions, that finds new ways to do things, that shamelessly steals and reinvents a hybrid culture-- to the Japanese.